


Lost

by falsteloj



Category: The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: 1920s, 1940s, Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Memories, Regret, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsteloj/pseuds/falsteloj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick and Daisy learn that the past is lost, and can never be recovered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost

Gatsby was dead.

For a time Nick had been able to forget, had lived each and every moment they had spent together all over again as he feverishly devoted page after page to Gatsby. He had lingered over the tone of his voice, and the warmth of his smile, and a thousand other trifles that had occupied his mind that summer, when he probably ought to have been writing, or reading, or working.

For an even longer stretch of time, perhaps because of the pills the doctor made him swallow each morning, or perhaps because of the defects he had so long despaired of in his own nature, he had even been able to imagine.

He had committed to paper words and deeds that could never have truly transpired. That no decent man would ever even have thought of.

And then, then, the words had left him. In their place there was nothing to cling to, nothing to spare him from the cruel clutches of reality.

Gatsby was gone.

Dead.

Buried.

What was more, Gatsby, though perhaps - _perhaps_ \- in some small way could have understood, could never have reciprocated. Could never have brought himself to turn his back on Daisy, just as Daisy could not bring herself to face Gatsby's memory.

Nick could never have made so immense and so lasting an impact on Gatsby. Daisy, his own cousin, could do no more but look upon him with pity. His father had all but disowned him, and even his mother had all but given up, and devoted herself instead to her charities.

The thoughts swirled, faster and faster, enough to be sickening, and returned always, over and over again to that awful truth:

Gatsby was dead, and no matter how hard Nick tried, no matter how many tears he shed, he could not write either of them a happy ending.

* * *

Tom was dead.

The end had come, a surprise not even to the man himself, in the spring of '43 - a final relief from the kind of drawn out suffering which results from too many years of too much drink, and too little caution.

Pamela was distraught, mourning at once for Tom, and for the father he had never managed to be to her. Daisy felt little enough of anything, and in public maintained only that her husband, like so many others, had never truly recovered from the crash of '29.

In private she determined that it was simply best to say nothing.

Between the two of them they set about stripping their still grand home of Tom's papers, and Tom's possessions, and even of Tom's lingering presence. It was Pamela who found the key to the locked drawer in Tom's bureau, and once she had it open exclaimed earnestly, wonderingly,

"Oh, mother, you were beautiful!"

Daisy only smiled wanly, gaze fixed on the age spots marring the now faded photograph. She _had_ been beautiful.

Beside the reminder of her long departed youth lay a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings, the dark eyes of the grainy figures staring up at her now mournfully, now accusingly. Jordan Baker, and her girlhood friends gazed out from the society pages, while Tom, along with his cronies and his business associates, stared sightlessly into the future.

Myrtle Wilson and her husband appeared over and over again, with the headlines screaming death, but the photograph depicting the happy couple on their wedding day.

Torn and crumpled and creased, wedged into the far corner of the drawer, was Gatsby, even.

It was the very last which most arrested her however, perhaps because it was the figure her thoughts had least strayed to over the years. Perhaps because those eyes were as beseeching now as they had been the last time she had seen them, begging, pleading with her to give Gatsby something, even if it was only the good grace to to attend his funeral.

"Who is he?" Pamela asked, brow furrowed with the effort of sifting the misty recollections of a face unseen since childhood.

"He was my cousin," Daisy stated, as though that explained everything, and suddenly the heat of that never ending summer was stifling. The excitement of having a secret of her very own, an adulterous love affair with a man who would forsake God himself to worship her. The guilt, and the fear, and the panic of what would become of her reputation, of her present, her past and her future, should anyone discover the truth about them.

The swirling confusion of not knowing which path she ought to take, and the wishing, endlessly, that she had never been born. That she had never laid eyes upon Jay Gatsby.

"Don't cry," Pamela soothed, mistaking the glimmer of tears in her eyes for nothing more complicated than the grief of a wife and a mother for a husband and a father. "Daddy's at peace now."

Daisy forced a smiled, and patted at her daughter's arm. Swept the clippings and the photographs together, and dropped it into the box with the rest of Tom's papers for the children's salvage drive. They must, after all, do their bit for the war effort.

Pamela took it out to the hallway, watching anxiously, as ever, for a telegraph boy with news of her own soldier. Daisy, in turn, stood and shut the door on Tom and the tumultuous years of their marriage.

There was no use in regrets, no point in dreaming of 'what ifs' and 'if onlys'.

The past was done.

Nobody could rewrite it.

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, feel free to chat / hit me with prompts over on Tumblr [@serenwib](http://serenwib.tumblr.com/) or Twitter [@falsteloj](https://twitter.com/falsteloj). :)


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